Greetings, GMAT warriors I took the GMAT this morning so for those who are interested, here is a brief rundown of my GMAT experience, along with some tips for those of you studying for the exam. Short overview of studies with some highlights I started my studies in August, with the exam planned for December, so I had 3-4 months of studies. I wouldn't recommend dragging it out any further, because at the end I was quite burned out. I didn't buy any of the prep courses offered by MGMAT, Veritas etc, mainly because I didn't think I'd get much use out of them. I know they can be a big help for others though, especially because of the diagnostics tools they offer, which help find the areas where your knowledge is lacking. If you think something like that would help you in your studies, then definitely go for it. At first I studied using only the OG, but it quickly turned out to be very lacking in terms of strategy. My first 3 CATs (as shown below) were done after having mostly studied using the OG, producing not too high scores. I then discovered the MGMAT guides, and boy were they good. I started using them sometime around my first Veritas CAT and I suppose the score on my GMATPrep CAT 2 reflects the improvement from studying the MGMAT guides. Speaking of the first GMATPrep CAT, I would highly recommend anyone attempting them to watch their fingers and to stay away from the CTRL-W (close tab) shortcut. For some inexplicable reason, the software doesn't save your progress if you close the tab, so unless you want to spend a whole morning preparing for the CAT and perform better than ever only to have it all erased 3 hours in, like I did, then keep your fingers in check! Also, the GMATPrep CAT 2 was written around 30 minutes after the first one was interrupted, because I didn't want to finish the day with nothing to show for it. Needless to say I didn't expect the score I got, and MGMAT deserves a lot of praise for their guides. Towards the end of my prep, I had gone through most of the MGMAT books and only really needed a lot of practice questions. For this, the GMAT Club forum question bank was very useful. However, GMAT Club also has a lot of garbage questions that in no way reflect what you would actually encounter on the exam. I set up the filter to only get questions from GMAC, MGMAT, Veritas and the Economist, and I'd recommend you do something similar. The day before the exam, I laid out all the items and clothes I would need, so I wouldn't have to look for anything when I woke up. My appointment was scheduled for 9 AM, so I went to bed at 8 PM, got about 10 hours of sleep, and got up at 6 AM, ate breakfast and took a cold shower to help wake my brain up. To no surpise, the exam itself ended up being very similar to the official GMATPrep CATs, both in terms of questions and user interface, so it helps to have done a few of them in advance. Practice materials used MGMAT quant, RC & SC guides. These were absolutely essential for learning the strategies necessary to beat especially quant and reading comprehension. Highlights for the quant books include the following: Guide 1 Ratios - This is quite a short chapter, but despite being one of my harder areas at first, MGMAT made these questions very trivial to solve Guide 2 Quadratic equations - F.e. knowing how to easily derive a and b in the format (x+y)(x+z)=X^2+ax+b is very useful, especially for data sufficiency questions Inequalities - These used to mess me up all the time at first, but with MGMAT they eventually became trivial. Guide 3 The double matrix method for overlapping sets - This was by far one of the most useful strategies I took away from the MGMAT guides. Very intuitive method for solving not only overlapping sets, but also some probability questions (eg. "what's the probability of both events A and B occuring?") The RTD (rate-time-distance)/RTW (rate-time-work) chart for solving work rate problems - Makes it much easier to solve these problems. Also goes very quick to write out once you've done a few of these questions. My system would be to always draw 3 vertical lines and 3 horizontal lines and start filling out the chart in exactly the same way every time. This way I never had to think about how to approach a work rate problem. Consecutive integers - These are tested quite often, and MGMAT does quite a good job in explaining it all. Guide 4 Ratios of side lengths of 30-60-90 triangles and 45-45-90 triangles - Very good to know especially for data sufficiency questions. Guide 5 Combinations - Very intuitive and easy-to-remember methods for solving these problems Properties of primes and prime factors - Seriously, these show up all the time on the GMAT, so learning this stuff is very helpful. MGMAT explains it all quite well. OG 2019. The OG was very useful for me, but only for one purpose. Being the official guide, the practice questions are good to go through at least once. The easy questions are very easy though, and I'd only recommend the medium and hard questions. However, the explanations provided by GMAC on the quant section are often completely useless, and include zero strategy. The methods provided are often ones that you would never want to use on the actual exam. Economist free CAT. Very good for getting a first taste of the GMAT and getting familiar with the test format and types of questions that show up. Veritas Prep free CATs. These mock tests are included with your free GMAT Club membership and were was similar enough to the real GMAT experience, but did have some weird quant questions from time to time. Since you get two tests, you can measure whether you're improving. You shouldn't compare these scores with the official mock tests scores though. MGMAT free CAT. As with the Veritas mock tests, this is pretty similar to the official mocks. As is pretty much common knowledge by now, the quant section is quite a bit harder than that of the official mocks. Official GMAT CATs. These are the only mock tests I would recommend for the latter part of your studies, when you want to gauge how well you'd do on the real test. Other mocks may be similar, but I wouldn't trust their scoring algorithms completely. GMAT Club forum question banks. These were an absolute godsend for late-stage prep, when I just needed to drill myself with lots of hard questions. Surely you could buy the MGMAT question bank or something similar, but most of these are available on GMAT Club anyway. Mock test results Economist CAT - 610 (Q38, V35) MGMAT CAT 1 - 650 (Q39, V40) Veritas CAT 1 - 660 (Q44, V37) GMATPrep CAT 1 - N/A GMATPrep CAT 2 - 770 (Q50, V45) Veritas CAT 2 - 730 (Q50, V40) Economist CAT - 770 (Q51, V45) GMATPrep CAT 3 - 710 (Q48, V38) GMATPrep CAT 4 - 770 (Q51, V42) GMATPrep CAT 5 - 740 (Q49, V42) GMATPrep CAT 6 - 760 (Q50, V42) Actual GMAT - 760 (Q50, V41) Tips Spend some time on learning proper strategies for tackling "standardized questions". By this I mean questions like overlapping sets, combinatorics and work rate, where there is a simple way to tackle or write out the problem, and which doesn't really change for different questions. Use the official guide to get access to lots of practice questions, but don't expect any strategy. Also ignore the quant explanations. They very rarely provide a method you'd want to actually use on the real test, and make things way more convoluted than they need to be. I'd recommend just looking up the question on GMAT Club afterwards, and reading one of the expert explanations. In short, the OG is recommended, but definitely not sufficient. Use the GMAT Club forum question bank, but use the filter settings to get questions only from GMAC and Manhattan and Veritas and whatever else you trust. This is to avoid getting garbage questions that are nowhere close to the real ones. If you haven't done any questions from a particular area (say RC) in a while, do a few of them before you attempt a mock test, to get back into the swing of things and to avoid getting completely stumped. Avoid dragging out your prep over more than 3-4 months, so you don't get burned out. Last but definitely not least - when doing a GMATPrep CAT, do not, and I repeat... DO NOT ... close your browser tab. You will lose all your progress. I learned that the hard way. Watch My Debrief with GMATNinja on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevWCjYe4KM Hear more about Toffel's GMAT journey in the following podcast.

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610 to 760 (Q50, V41) - GMAT experience and advice

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DrVanNostrand

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04 Oct 2020, 15:26

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Congratulations on your score.
Please tell me whether I should GMAT CLUB $79 pack or the eGMat pack?

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Toffelfabriken

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09 Oct 2020, 08:38

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prashantsharan

Congratulations on your score.
Please tell me whether I should GMAT CLUB $79 pack or the eGMat pack?

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Hi and thank you for the congratulations. Unfortunately I do not have experience with neither the GMAT CLUB packs nor the eGMAT packs, so I cannot say whether they are worth the money or not.

DrVanNostrand

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12 Oct 2020, 12:58

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Toffelfabriken

prashantsharan

Congratulations on your score.
Please tell me whether I should GMAT CLUB $79 pack or the eGMat pack?

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Hi and thank you for the congratulations. Unfortunately I do not have experience with neither the GMAT CLUB packs nor the eGMAT packs, so I cannot say whether they are worth the money or not.

Thanks for your reply. I hope you will be available to answer questions in the future.

Toffelfabriken

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26 Jan 2021, 11:11

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Genoa

Hi Toeffl!
We have already had a few chats here on the forum.
This time I would like to ask you how you used the ERROR LOG.

If you used it, could you please explain in details how you review it and which platform you used?

Thank you in advance!

Hi.

I'm pretty sure my approach to using an error log was suboptimal, so that's one thing I would improve if I had to take the GMAT again. Don't interpret my method as being optimal.

I used a spreadsheet (see attached screenshot) in which I collected all questions in which I made an avoidable mistake, was careless, wasn't familiar enough with the topic, realized there was a more efficient method than the one I used, etc. I then wrote down what mistake I made and how to avoid making it again. For example, this way I realized that I often forgot to double-check my answer, and thus kept making careless mistakes. I would then go through these specific questions a few more times at later dates to see whether I repeated the same mistake.

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DrVanNostrand

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26 Jan 2021, 12:44

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Hi,

What's your educational background.I mean is your bachelor's degree quant heavy?

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Toffelfabriken

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26 Jan 2021, 13:51

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prashantsharan

Hi,

What's your educational background.I mean is your bachelor's degree quant heavy?

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Depends on what you compare it to. My BSc was in finance, so not incredibly quant-heavy compared to something like actuarial science, but more than in other social sciences. We did things like econometrics, multivariate optimization, derivatives pricing etc.

DrVanNostrand

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26 Jan 2021, 14:03

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prashantsharan

Hi,

What's your educational background.I mean is your bachelor's degree quant heavy?

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Honestly,I asked that question because I have seen mostly people with a quant heavy background like Bsc Maths/Physics,B.tech,etc. get to those scores.

If you see through my perspective, your achievement gets even bigger.

Thanks for your reply again.

DrVanNostrand

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13 Mar 2021, 15:21

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Hi,

How did you prepare for the quant section?

I mean did you practice questions topic wise from GMAT Club or did you practice a mixed set of questions?

Also, what were your sources for pra ticing quant questions apart from GMAT Club,OG, and OG Quant Review?

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Toffelfabriken

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13 Mar 2021, 15:32

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prashantsharan

Hi,

The style of preparation depended on what the purpose of the study was.

When going through the Manhattan resources and systematically learning how to tackle each individual type of question. For this, I would practice the new techniques on a series of questions specifically from that topic.

Later, when trying to improve stamina and my ability to perform under exam conditions (when you don't know in advance which topic the next question will be), I would instead do larger numbers of questions from mixed topics, while practicing my timing techniques.

Aside from GMAT Club, OG and OG Quant Review, there was no need for additional sources of practice questions, simply because the GMAT Club question bank is so incredibly vast and encompasses so many different sources.

Hope this was of any help!

DrVanNostrand

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13 Mar 2021, 15:39

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prashantsharan

Thanks for your answer. How many questions should I practice for any topic?

Toffelfabriken

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13 Mar 2021, 16:43

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prashantsharan

Thanks for your answer. How many questions should I practice for any topic?

This is highly individual and depends on you, the topic and how difficult you find it. Personally, when working on a new topic with a new strategy, I would start off by applying it to 600-level questions until I could do those semi-comfortably (usually after 15-20 questions. This depends highly on your overall quant-ability though) and then move on to 700-level questions, which is where most of the time was spent. The goal would then be to try to identify potential pitfalls and traps and save these in my error log, as well as read up on expert solutions so as to try to find more efficient ways to apply the strategy.

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DrVanNostrand

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15 Mar 2021, 13:02

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Toffelfabriken

prashantsharan

Thanks for your answer. How many questions should I practice for any topic?

Thanks alot for your reply. It's truly appreciated. I hope you will be here to help us out.

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610 to 760 (Q50, V41) - GMAT experience and advice

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